Philip Rideout
prideout.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2010
Philip Rideout, a graphics engineer, writes about 3D rendering, mesh generation, SVG, procedural terrain and OpenGL.
What HN saysHN commenters praise his SVG knot diagrams and OpenGL tutorials, and point to his octasphere article as a method that gives nicer meshes.
15HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
34stories submitted
1.0Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2010people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Filament and WASM: Physically-based rendering for web3 people · 120 points · first shared 2018 · 13 comments on HN
- 2Generating SVG for the prime knots2 people · 242 points · first shared 2020 · 26 comments on HN
- 3Serialization-Based Undo2 people · 79 points · first shared 2021 · 21 comments on HN
- 4The Simple, Flexible, Octasphere2 people · 9 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 5Procedural Terrain with Distance Fields2 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 6Exploring Special Relativity2 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 73D Wireframes Using SVG1 people · 394 points · first shared 2019 · 54 comments on HN
- 8An unsolved problem in graph theory1 people · 81 points · first shared 2020 · 9 comments on HN
- 9Hot loading C++ game code1 people · 23 points · first shared 2021 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Show HN: Tiny C library for tessellating lines and curves1 people · 6 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 11Mesh Generation with Python1 people · 6 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 12Rust on the web and an ECS lite architecture1 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Vector Math with C++0x1 people · 5 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Show HN: WebGL Renderer for Chip Layouts1 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15Cube Games and Group Theory1 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
l0b0 · 2024-01-11
Love the double hearts in https://prideout.net/blog/svg_knots/knots/8_5.svg
orbifold · 2015-06-21
Also http://prideout.net/ has some very nice tutorials on advanced OpenGL topics (tesselation for example).
ilink · 2013-10-28
Performance for this kind of particle effect will be even better once Webgl2 is widely available. Transform feedback (or other hacks) let you manipulate the particle positions on the videocard itself. There's a great article about them here: http://prideout.net/blog/?p=67
razster · 2024-01-11
How is it feasible to have a .svg file that has links to other .SVG files? https://prideout.net/blog/svg_knots/knottable_v1.svg. Has this capacity been around for some time?
jmiskovic · 2021-09-28
I recently got tip on a 3D version of round rectangles, called octasphere: https://prideout.net/blog/octasphere/
It's not a direct-to-screen rendering technique like the article, rather a way to procedurally construct the 3D mesh based on few parameters (W,H,D, radius, # of subdivisions). Just like rectangles in 2D, boxes in 3D are too simple and have harsh sharp edges. Adding rounded edges makes them nicer to look at. Additionally, the octasphere method gives you capsules and spheres and everything in-between.
Edit: Oh look - there's a front page article that talks about this in-depth: https://wwwtyro.net/2021/09/24/rounded-box.html
johndough · 2020-09-23
Computing distance fields with a jump flooding approach in O(n log n) is neat, but there is a O(n) algorithm, which might be faster https://prideout.net/blog/distance_fields/
prideout · 2019-02-07
This is the book that inspired me to create a WebGL knot gallery (https://prideout.net/knotgl/) which I eventually rewrote using Filament (https://prideout.net/knotess/).